Snowpocalypse

     Heather would call me or I would call her after I got off work around four o'clock or so and she would come over to my house.  She moved out of the apartment she had shared with Ryan and rejoined the "MovingBackInWithMyParentsForAWhile" club.  All of her other friends were friends and co-workers with Ryan too, and she needed to get away from all that. Being with me was her only real escape from that life.

     I'd also like to believe that I was good company.  We would watch TV together and miss half of the shows with the distractions of our own commentary.  She would stay and eat dinner with me, sometimes I would cook sometimes she would pay for pizza.  And sometimes, she would have to go and throw up.

    She had to explain to me that she have developed a new condition called Gastroparesis.  Literally translated it means paralyzed stomach.  While the average human stomach digests food in an hour or so, the stomach of someone with Gastroparesis might take four to twelve hours to digest the same meal.  Sometimes the food that's been eaten goes bad inside the stomach and it has to be regurgitated.

     You can learn about it with medical terms at http://digestive.niddk.nih.gov/ddiseases/pubs/gastroparesis/

     She had developed this condition shortly after she started dating Ryan and I had seen her less and less.  She had lost a lot of weight from it and she was not quite as curvy as she had been when I first admired her in geology class.  She told me later that she had been at her biggest when I first met her.  By the time she and Ryan broke up and we started spending every day together, she had lost almost fifty pounds.

     I still thought she was hot.  Just a skinnier version of the same hot girl I had met years earlier.  I told her I was attracted to her and that I would love to volunteer for any newly-single sexual experimentation that she might be planning to help get over Ryan.

     She told me, "I don't want to just sleep with you.  Right now any sex I have needs to be with someone I don't care about.  If anything is ever going to happen between you and me, I would want it to be a real relationship that I can take seriously and I'm not ready for that right now."

     While it was disappointing to be denied sex, I really liked her answer.  I hadn't even really thought about dating her.  As soon as she suggested it, being committed to her sounded like it would be... good.  I kept it always in the back of my head as something that someday would be.

     Late February 2009, about a month or so after Heather had started coming over every day, a snowpocolypse was headed for Virginia and most of the east coast.  The news warned us for days that three to five feet of snow was about to fall out of the sky and shut everything down for days.  My roommates and I went grocery shopping and prepared to be snowed in.  Hours before the snow began to fall I spoke with Heather on the phone and she said she'd rather be snowed in with me than at her parents house.  The beltway was glazing over with snow as I rushed back home after picking her up when my Jeep spun around five times before gently bending the front fender on the highway barrier.

   Remember, always turn into a spin, or at least try to remember.  I sure as hell forgot.

   Anyway, we spent a few days together, snowed in at my little communal home in a suburban cul-de-sac.  While we had shopped for food, we had also become bored with what we had and searched for alternatives, to stave of boredom more than hunger.  I offered Heather a Cup-o-noodles which she promptly ate.

    What I had failed to warn her of, was that that Cup-o-noodles had been sitting in my parents laundry room for at least a year before I had pilfered it for the snowpocolypse.

   She got sick.  Very sick.

   She threw up in my bathroom for over an hour until she was just puking up stomach acid.  She told me that she was going to need an ambulance.  She quickly explained between heaves that sometimes the vomiting just wouldn't stop on it's own.  Her body would just get stuck in vomit mode until she received IV nausea drugs.

  Getting an ambulance to come pick someone up when there is four feet of snow on the ground in a cul-de-sac is not as easy as it sounds.  They sent an ambulance first.  The driver didn't feel that he'd be able to get turned back around if he came all the way down our un-ploughed road.  A second, smaller vehicle was sent out to come down to the cul-de-sac, pick Heather up and bring her an eighth of a mile back down to the intersection where the ambulance was waiting.

   A cluster of EMT's came into my house and were led to my bathroom in which Heather was haunched over my toilet as she had been for a few hours.  Amid the questions and explanations of sarcoidosis and gastroparesis, Heather lightened the mood by speaking to one EMT in particular.

     "Your fly is down."

     "It'll be ok," he clearly hadn't heard her.

     "No, you.  Your zipper is down."

     The EMT's, my roommates who had crowded the doorway to observe and I all laughed as the tall and brawney man with the shaved head tried to shake off his embarrassment while pulling his zipper back up to the proper position.

     I think we all laughed because we wanted the situation to be lightened.  There is a strong desire to find humor in a situation caused by medical ailment. I found later that when the situation does not offer any humor, the desire to find it becomes even stronger.

    The gurney wouldn't work in the snow and the EMT's had to half carry, half walk Heather out to the van-like-ambulance, which took her to the full sized ambulance, which took her to the ER. The whole transport took about an hour all together.  She was given IV fluids and nausea medicine and I made the perilous drive several hours later to come and pick her up.

   We agreed that the year-old Cup-o-noodles was the obvious culprit and Heather vowed never to eat Cup-o-noodles again.

   Along with the desire to find humor, serious medical events also inspire you to unprofessionally diagnose the event as a fluke, something caused by unique circumstances that can easily be avaoded in the future.

    Unlike the desire to find humor, when a diagnosis can't be dismissed as a singular fluke, the desire changes to hope.  Hope that a professional diagnosis will be attainable.  Cup-o-noodle persecution becomes nothing more than a misguided memory.
    

Closed door, opened window.

     It was January of 2009 and I had woken up that morning with a sad errand on my schedule.

     My pet bunny Pebbles had passed away and I needed to go bury her in my parents backyard.

     I had named her Pebbles because that's what she made in my hand when I first held her.  Her companion Bam-Bam had died only a month earlier and I think that loss, along with the move to the new house, somehow caused her to simply stop living.  I only moved to the other side of town from my parents house and I had a small pet cemetery in their back yard in which Bam-Bam had already been put to rest.  I had to do it that day because Pebbles had actually died a week earlier and my roommates were starting to complain about the dead rabbit being kept in the freezer.

     I had just loaded the deceased into my Jeep when my phone rang.  I saw on the caller ID that it was Heather and when I put the phone to my ears I could tell immediately that she was crying.  My first thought was, "Aww, she's crying because Pebbles is dead."  I had done some crying over it myself, after all.

     My second thought was, "Idiot, she's not calling about your bunny.  How would she even know about it?"  We had not spoken to each other for a few months.

     I eventually found the clarity to be responsive and I asked her what was wrong.  It took her a few deep breaths and sighs before she could get it out.  Ryan had been cheating on her.

     Not just regular cheating either.

     She had been with Ryan for almost two years.  They worked at a little dinner theater and had acted in several plays together.  They had moved in together, gotten a joint checking account, a time share in Florida and two cats.  They had spoken seriously about marriage and jokingly referred to each other as husband and wife.  The entire time they had been together he had been cheating on her with the same person, Casey.

     Casey was more than just a mildly moronic blonde with big tits, she was a stripper too.  When she wasn't working as a stripper, she worked as an actress, in a little dinner theater, with Ryan and Heather.  Her vanity was right next to Heather's and they had sat next to each other every night for almost two years, and Casey had been sleeping with Ryan behind Heather's back the entire time.  Casey even had her own boyfriend named Craig, whom she had married.  Heather and Ryan had been invited to the wedding.

     The affair continued past the wedding until one day when Casey had a big, blow-out fight with Craig and told him she had been sleeping with Ryan purely to hurt him.  She told him that she and Ryan were in love and that they had plans to leave Craig and Heather so that they could run off and get married.

     Craig had sought out a shoulder to cry on and ended up pouring his heart out to a woman who had met Heather and Ryan at the wedding.  When this mutual acquaintance asked Craig if he had informed Heather that she was being similarly betrayed, he answered that he didn't know how.  So this woman took it upon herself to call Heather and be the bearer of bad news.

     Of course all she said over the phone at first was, "Ryan's been cheating on me."  She explained that she was at work but she couldn't focus and needed to leave but she was too upset to drive.

    It took me a few seconds to realize what she really needed, "Do you want me to come pick you up?" I asked.

     The answer was yes.  As she had sat there at work having just found out that her committed relationship was a lie, she realized that all of her current friends were also co-workers at the little dinner theatre.  She knew that the story would spread through the troupe with true theatre gossip speed and that it would not be long before everyone knew.  She had needed a friend that wasn't a part of that world, and I had been the first person she thought of.

     I picked her up at work and through streaming tears and sniffled sighs as she got in my Jeep she said, "Nice car."  It was new (certified pre-owned) and I was delighted that she was able to notice and comment on it, despite her emotional state.  I played the "I Will Survive" cover by Cake off of a newly burned CD and drove her to come hang out with me at my house while she told me the story that I've just shared with you.

    We ended up spending almost every day together for the next six months.

Three in One

     This story is three stories wrapped up into one; my wife's story, her medical mystery and our story together.  No three stories ever really have the same beginning, so I'll begin with my favorite topic.

     Heather was born in Atlanta Georgia in October of 1985.  Her parents, Jim and Cynthia were both career military so she spent most of her youth moving around the country and the world in true army brat style.  Patches of memories from Korea, Portugal, California, Arizona, New York, Virginia and Texas are still alive and well inside her head, but in the end she has always claimed Texas as her home state.  While living in this nomadic world has left her with scattered memories of her youth, she remembers all too well the regular experience of being in the hospital.

     At the age of 9 she started getting very ill, putting her in the hospital sometimes for days.   At 12 she had a biopsy to check for the lymphnode behind her heart.  There is still a large scar on her chest today that I rarely notice any more. They found a mass, but it had calcified.  Her doctors weren't sure quite to make of it and it was quickly dismissed as a result of an overproduction of calcium.  At the age of 19 they biopsied a lymphnode by her lungs.  After reviewing the x-rays, one of the doctors discovered that she had sarcoidosis. 

     You've heard of sarcoidosis right?  The disease that killed Bernie Mac (may he rest in peace)?  It was suggested as a possible diagnosis that would be quickly ruled out on almost every episode of the TV medical mystery drama House MD.

     It's an auto immune disease that attacks different parts of the body and creates scar tissue, mostly in the lungs.  Heather and her parents were told that there's a good chance that she won't live to see 50.

    You can learn more about it in more accurate medical terms at National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.


     I'd like to believe that everyone knows how they would conduct themselves if the knew that their  time in this world would be shorter than most.  Heather choose to experience and enjoy as much as she could.

    I would love to tell you that the first time I met my wife I saw her and bells began to ring and doves appeared as if from nowhere as I looked deep into her eyes and realized that this would be the person I'd spend the rest of my life with.  My wife would prefer it too because she doesn't like the way I tell the real story.

     We met in a geology class at a popular community college in Virginia shortly after we had both moved back to the area in 2006.  We were both members of the oh-so-popular, "MovingBackInWithMyParentsForAwhile" club, a group that was growing at a rapid rate at the time.  I checked her out from two desks back and one over during the first class (I was 24 and checking out all attractive women was more habitual than ever before).

     She had long, straight, dark hair that hung half-way down her back, covering most of the logo on her black t-shirt.  Her dark skin offered a suggestion of exotic ancestry but her clothes were blatant evidence of an American upbringing.  She had all the right curves in all the right places and she slouched her shoulders like someone with an abundance of don't-give-a-shit.

     I thought she was pretty hot.  Then we got to know each other during the periodic five minute smoke breaks we were given during the three hour class.  She was outgoing, smart, and most of all funny.  She had a raunchy sense of humor, the kind that comes from being a tomboy and making fart jokes as a kid instead of whatever it is that girlie girls did as children.  It was her smile that really drew me in.  Her big beautiful smile like something out of a magazine ad for lipstick would spread across her face almost every time she spoke.

    I thought she was awesome, to the point that I had created a dilemma in my mind.  I thought, "This is the kind of girl that I would leave my girlfriend for."  Yes, I had a girlfriend and yes, that is the part of the story my wife doesn't like.  I knew that spending time with Heather and trying to conceal it in any way would probably get me in trouble so I very quickly introduced her to my girlfriend, Livia.

Years later, Heather confessed to me that she was attracted to me at first too, but that introducing her to Livia had turned that switch to the off position in her head.  Besides, she had a long-distance boyfriend at the time anyway.  Heather and Livia became friends and we fell in and out of touch with one another over the next few years. 

     Livia and I moved in together, broke up, moved out and rejoined the MovingBackInWithMyParents club.  A few months after that I moved into a house with some friends as well as some strangers that I met off of craigslist.

     Heather ended her long distance relationship, and almost immediately found a new boyfriend at the dinner theater she worked at named Ryan.  I heard from her less and less after that.  Until one day in the spring of 2009.